Might and Magic Might & Magic X Pre-Release Thread

[Stabwound]

There are some people here that would complain if Mila Kunis gave them a blowjob and only did it because she got $25 for it.

 

[LeStryfe79]

There are some people here that would complain if Mila Kunis gave them a blowjob and only did it because she got $25 for it.

That's because she's only can't into grid based head.

 

[xemous]

there is no human element to the artworks at all. its as if they were made by a machine instead of a man.

 

[Dorateen]

I doubt it has anything to do with Grimrock, if anything it's because of the success of the Obsidian/InXile kickstarters and even Shroud of the Avatar that showed there still is an interest in real CRPG...

As well as the looming spectre of Grimoire and subsequent release of its demo, no doubt!

 

[Varnaan]

How could I forget about Grimmoire, the world's most awaited eternally upcoming CRPG.

Truly Cleve is the one to thank for the revival of the genre, as he spearheaded it with his communication skills, humanism and transparent business practices.

 

[Lady_Error]

I agree with the M&M ladies that grid-based movement gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling.

I think grid-based movement is a good fit for turn-based combat because both make the gameplay less stressful and more abstract. The abstraction works well to activate our imagination, which in turn creates good immershun.

 

[Infinitron]

I doubt it has anything to do with Grimrock, if anything it's because of the success of the Obsidian/InXile kickstarters and even Shroud of the Avatar that showed there still is an interest in real CRPG and after a mediocre HoMM VI they're trying salvage the new M&M universe with a relatively low budget game that will, even if it bombs, not impact the company and if it sells will give them a lot of credit in what they're trying to do.

None of those games are like M&M, though. Grimrock is responsible for proving the first-person, grid-based, party-based RPG still has an audience. Anyway I think they've specifically mentioned it a few times.

 

[Varnaan]

Mea culpa if they named it as an influence or a trigger but in my eyes games like Grimrock and Dungeon Master have little to do with the like of Might and Magic and/or Wizardry besides the superficial similarities, and as we've seen for quite a while on the codex the audience isn't really the same either.

 

[Grunker]

To me, M&M has always been about making a quality party to explore a vast land filled with cites, dungeons, adventure, and other interesting things from a first person perspective. There are very few games that do this and even less that do it well. I agree with Grunker that the lore and especially grid based movement were not what made the series great. Furthermore, I think grids work fine in pure dungeon crawls and their like, but in an open world environment, it is a bit silly when dressed up in modern 3D graphics. I think they should have spent more time being old school with RPG mechanics and character building as opposed to their focus on nostalgic trivialities. Basically, I think they're creating a game that's destined to not quite hit the mark no matter who is playing it.

Grunker, you can hate on grid movement, you can hate on M&M, you can hate on the setting, you can hate on whatever you want and I can deal with it, but please for the love of whatever is holy in your generic fantasy non-SF M&M setting, please stop pretending that you were presenting "arguments" when your sole argument was the famed nostalgia goggles.

Oh please. Stop acting like victims of a horrible drive-by argument. I made one comment about nostalgia. Everything else has been arguments, and nobody has argued them yet. I'll give you a recap:

1) The setting was not an important part of what made M&M great - it was a defined set of mechanics within a diverse fantasy context.

2) The setting was banal and cliché, even at the time. It served as a decent backdrop for exposure of what was basically a game in the vein LeStryfe explained above.

3) At their heart, these games where about exploration. Progression mechanics, setting, open world, character mechanics; M&M worked so bloody well because everything else played into this central concept of exiting, mysterious exploration with something new around every corner. A puzzle, a monster, an item, a dungeon. That's why the setting was so inconsequential. As long as there was something new and mysterious under the next stone, it didn't matter that much what character it had. This could have been set anywhere at any time as long as it kept its core focus on exploration.

My hopes for the new game is that it keeps this focus. I don't care how they do it. If they want us to explore a straight up fantasy world instead of a fantasy world with a blaster rifle in the end game, that's fine by me. As long as they make it interesting. What has made me leery has been announcements of playtime, progression and grid; things I think work less well for that focus. One of the few things that was legitimately better in 6-8 was the free look, free movement, because it benefited exploration more.

 

[Zeriel]

This thread made my respect for Grunker go from immense to abysmal. A sad day, indeed.

Last thing I'll say about grid-based movement: immediate and instant response and correlation between key press and discrete movement distances in the world is a mechanical advantage, and pretty distinct. Whether or not you like it is another matter altogether, but it's still a thing. I'm going to go back to Demise to make a comparison. Going from the entrance of the dungeon to, say, level 3, takes a few seconds for an experienced player taking advantage of the grid-based movement. Doing so in a 3D environment with "free" movement would take minutes, if not much longer. You could make an argument that a 3D game could be designed to have huge movement speed to approximate the same effect, but it never works out that way.

3D free movement games are designed with verisimilitude in mind first of all, even if the environments, art, or style are wacky and utterly unrealistic. This means an emphasis on keeping movement similar to the real world, to promote both the idea that the environments are real, and that you are moving between them in a human-like manner. In a way, it reminds me of the difference between old X-COM and new XCOM. The former was a game primarily meant to be played--over and over again, where getting to the end didn't really matter. It wasn't about the experience of finishing the game, it was about just playing the gamey bits. Grid-based movement strikes me the same way. It chips away at immersion a bit, but makes replaying (or backtracking) much more fun and breezy. It's about playing the game, not being immersed in another world.

 

[Broseph]

It's about playing the game, not being immersed in another world.

Exactly, grid-based isn't a problem for a Might and Magic game. Immersion is the least important thing here. Might and Magic games are fun because of the gameplay, not because they're immersive hiking simulators.

 

[Sceptic]

See? much better. Instead of throwing trollish flamebaits, you can actually do what sea did in the Morrowind thread and present your arguments in bait-free context (ok, so sea did pepper delicious bait in his initial post, but he did it masterfully) and we can have a good discussion about it. Isn't that so much more fun?

1) The setting was not an important part of what made M&M great - it was a defined set of mechanics within a diverse fantasy context.

You did choose your wording carefully when you said that mechanics are what matters most in making M&M great, and I agree. But the mechanics varied wildly, completely and irreversibly. THREE TIMES during the history of the series. The setting did not. You just cannot claim in any way, no matter how much you like or dislike the setting, no matter how much you like or dislike the mechanics (which ones anyway? the ones from MM1? the ones from MM7? can you even think of a mechanic that remained unchanged between these two?) that the setting was part of what made M&M PERIOD, great or not. And for a simple reason: they stuck to the same setting, the same backstory, building slowly upon it, using plot elements introduced in MM3 to develop the MM6-7 plot, with of course all the crisscrossing with HOMM, to build one single setting to encompass all changes in mechanics. Kind of like an anchor. Wizardry went the opposite direction and changed setting willy-nilly while maintaining some elements of its mechanics as the anchor (look at race and class selections in wiz 1 and wiz 8, 20 years apart). Having some kind of anchor is important when you're changing fundamental things within a numbered series, and I'd go as far as saying it's one reason why the M&M fandom didn't revile the HOMM games: they were spinoffs with almost totally unrelated gameplay but they DID manage to maintain their link to the name by using and vastly expanding on the setting. I will agree with you that the setting is not the one thing that made M&M great, but you can't disregard its contribution to the M&M identity. Until Ubisoft made Ashan an M&M game that didn't link into the established setting was unthinkable (in before Roxor and Crusaders )

2) The setting was banal and cliché, even at the time. It served as a decent backdrop for exposure of what was basically a game in the vein LeStryfe explained above.

Actually the setting was quite revolutionary at the time. It was the first setting that blended standard fantasy and SF and tried to be coherent about it. Ultima quickly abandoned the SF trappings and everyone rejoiced because they were just thrown there in the pot pourri of undigested ideas that Garriott came up with. What do you find cliche about the setting? the Ancients and their highly advanced civilization, whom you never interact directly with due to their war with the Creators (whom you never even meet) having cut off from the ships they had programmed to seed planets with life? the civilizations on each planet having reverted back to barbarism due to being cut off from contact with the Ancients and the gradual deterioration of the technology that they are unable to maintain? the robotic Guardians that the Ancients left on the planets to take care of things when they couldn't going berserk because of buggy programming and waging war against their creations? How many other settings like this can you name in video games of the late 1980s?

As I said above: you may or may not like the setting. You may or may not consider it essential to your enjoyment of M&M. But like it or not it WAS an integral part of what made Might and Magic. Now the very nature of the games made setting something you could ignore, and if you choose to this doesn't detract from enjoyment of the gameplay and exploration. But why do you want me to ignore it when I can have my great exploration and mechanics AND a fun setting that got expanded on and led into a much more interesting backstory than I would expect from such a type of game? Why deny enjoyment of a well-crafted component of the game just because that component is optional?

3) At their heart, these games where about exploration. Progression mechanics, setting, open world, character mechanics; M&M worked so bloody well because everything else played into this central concept of exiting, mysterious exploration with something new around every corner. A puzzle, a monster, an item, a dungeon. That's why the setting was so inconsequential.

"Mysterious exploration with something new around every corner" and "setting" go hand in hand for me. Again why do you want to limit yourself and the game? Why do you want to forcibly extract an element out of it that could make it better? "A puzzle, a monster, an item, a dungeon"? Yeah these are all good. You know what else is also good? coming to an altar control center in the "golden pyramid" under Terra and finding out the true nature of Alamar Sheltem, that dude that I'd spent 3 games going after. Why do you want to take this away from Grunker? I never said that the game should have no puzzles to slow down progress, and should have level scaling and leveled loot lists removing all unique item placement. Why do you hate me so much when I never did anything to you?

My hopes for the new game is that it keeps this focus. I don't care how they do it. If they want us to explore a straight up fantasy world instead of a fantasy world with a blaster rifle in the end game, that's fine by me. As long as they make it interesting.

It's been a given for over a decade now that the old NWC world is dead and no M&M game will ever have that fantasy/SF mix. I mourned and got over it 10 years ago. And if Limbic/Ubisoft want us to explore a straight cliche fantasy world like Ashan, that's fine by me too, because despite what you may think after reading all the above what I want first and foremost from this game is "this central concept of exiting, mysterious exploration with something new around every corner. A puzzle, a monster, an item, a dungeon", and if they can deliver that then not having my beloved setting is a small price to pay. My initial post (the very first one - where I had the "incline" sign) was more surprised than anything. I just did not expect so many people liked the old setting and the overarching backstory that linked all the games together. I actually laughed at whoever raged in that thread over this not being the old setting because, you kow, welcome to 10 years ago? My issue is that you read my initial statement and built a strawman to justify "doubting your allegiance to some codexers". And THEN you used the nostalgia goggles. I like you despite often disagreeing with you, but NEVER DO THAT AGAIN. Or else plane tickets :bryce:

What has made me leery has been announcements of playtime, progression and grid; things I think work less well for that focus. One of the few things that was legitimately better in 6-8 was the free look, free movement, because it benefited exploration more.

A lot of the M&M fans, I've noticed, like both. They have their advantages and disadvantages. Now Limbic have specifically said they want to recreate the WOX experience. You can't recreate the WOX experience with the MM6 system because that'd be the MM6 experience. It's not that I'm happy they picked one over the other, it's that, if they want the WOX experience, then grid is a given, end of discussion. You could try to convince them to go for an MM6-like game next, and I'll be the first to jump up and down with uncontained excitement (well, if this one turns out to be good first...).

Also, your shitting on M&M setting finally reveals your true reasons for not liking Dune

 

[Grunker]

This thread made my respect for Grunker go from immense to abysmal. A sad day, indeed.

Alas, a reputation is like glass. All it takes to splinter it is one comment about the quality of the setting in one of my favourite video games. I truely bemoan the shriveling of my e-penis that must take place because people disagree with me on the internet where before they did not.

I'm less interested in your disintegrating respect for me and more in your arguments. However, I see you chose to argue your points, so..:

Last thing I'll say about grid-based movement: immediate and instant response and correlation between key press and discrete movement distances in the world is a mechanical advantage

What part of free movement isn't more immeadiate and more instant that waiting for a movement animation and/or your own presses with grid-based movement?

You could make an argument that a 3D game could be designed to have huge movement speed to approximate the same effect, but it never works out that way.

I could and I will. Or teleportation magic.

Grid-based movement strikes me the same way. It chips away at immersion a bit, but makes replaying (or backtracking) much more fun and breezy. It's about playing the game, not being immersed in another world.

There's no argument here, just a statement. "Grid-based movement makes replaying easier." Why?

Broseph and Zeriel, why decide to employ another strawman? When have I claimed free movement was for the benefit of "immersion"? Fuck that. It's solely about less hassle. How you can argue that grid-based movement is actually less of a hassle than free movement is beyond me, but I guess you have your reasons.

 

[Charles-cgr]

Broseph and Zeriel, why decide to employ another strawman? When have I claimed free movement was for the benefit of "immersion"? Fuck that. It's solely about less hassle. How you can argue that grid-based movement is actually less of a hassle than free movement is beyond me, but I guess you have your reasons.

No camera hassles. No getting stuck because a shrub or tree root or one foot ledge is in your way. No endless hiking. Hassle wise it is actually quite easy to argue in favor of grid based.

 

[Grunker]

Warning, huge wall of text incoming, but you asked for it Sceptic

See? much better. Instead of throwing trollish flamebaits, you can actually do what sea did in the Morrowind thread and present your arguments in bait-free context (ok, so sea did pepper delicious bait in his initial post, but he did it masterfully) and we can have a good discussion about it. Isn't that so much more fun?

You mean like I did from the beginning? People chose to fly into a rage, I didn't ask them too. This is the Fallout thread over again; my opinion was contrary to popular opinion, and instead of arguing, people chose to shoot me down with ad hominems and insults. Oh, and "losing respect for me." Ouch man. Brother None even "dropped the mike" on me. Can you believe it?

The trauma.

It seems you were kind enough to provide arguments now though, and you shall receive rebuttals for your efforts:

You did choose your wording carefully when you said that mechanics are what matters most in making M&M great, and I agree. But the mechanics varied wildly, completely and irreversibly. THREE TIMES during the history of the series. The setting did not. You just cannot claim in any way, no matter how much you like or dislike the setting, no matter how much you like or dislike the mechanics (which ones anyway? the ones from MM1? the ones from MM7? can you even think of a mechanic that remained unchanged between these two?) that the setting was part of what made M&M PERIOD, great or not. And for a simple reason: they stuck to the same setting, the same backstory, building slowly upon it, using plot elements introduced in MM3 to develop the MM6-7 plot, with of course all the crisscrossing with HOMM, to build one single setting to encompass all changes in mechanics. Kind of like an anchor

The care placed in paying homage to and using elements from games earlier in the series when it comes to lore does not make that lore more proficient or well-crafted. M&M is perhaps the prime example of the cliché fantasy world of those times: a wildly high fantasy world where anything goes - anything. As Tolkien said, worlds are defined by their limits more than their possibilities, and the reason everyone abandoned the fantasy world crafting of the eighties and early nineties is because the anything goes worlds were straight up boring. They were extremely similar, as indeed I claim M&M and Wizardry's worlds are - the differences between them are purely cosmetic.

In terms of substance, there is little. M&M and Wizardry's setting was used for these games because the passionate nerds who crafted these games could tell literally any story they wanted with them. These guys were fans and Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, and they didn't have the sense not to combine the too without any reasons to do so.

As for your point that mechanics varied wildly in the series, notice that I said the series were crafted around exploration. That's not a mechanic, that's a premise. What I meant by a set of mechanics was that even if all these games had different mechanics all of them shared mechanics crafted around this premise. This premise is what ties together the series, and not the setting or the story.

"Mysterious exploration with something new around every corner" and "setting" go hand in hand for me. Again why do you want to limit yourself and the game? Why do you want to forcibly extract an element out of it that could make it better? "A puzzle, a monster, an item, a dungeon"? Yeah these are all good. You know what else is also good? coming to an altar control center in the "golden pyramid" under Terra and finding out the true nature ofAlamar Sheltem, that dude that I'd spent 3 games going after. Why do you want to take this away from Grunker? I never said that the game should have no puzzles to slow down progress, and should have level scaling and leveled loot lists removing all unique item placement. Why do you hate me so much when I never did anything to you?

Woah, bruv, don't get drama queen on me here. I don't hate you. I question your wisdom in this case. Unlike most others here I don't suddenly lose all respect for an individual simply because we disagree about something.

To your point: you're right. You're right in the way that a good setting and story would have made the interesting discoveries even better. As it stands, it's one of Might & Magic's only weaknesses that the discoveries you made weren't exactly well-crafted, original or creative. The stories told and mysteries uncovered in these games were derivative pieces that mirrored their period, told by great game developers who were inept at telling stories and crafting world. M&M evoked a great sense of discovery through clever use of mechanics, not through lore. M&M's world and story is similar to DOOM's in the way it mirrors the period it was made in and the passion of the guys who made the game, except M&M's is obviously more complex and has more depth. That doesn't save it from being banal and derivative though. Anyone can write a complex story. Just keep piling on details until you fall over from exhaustion.

Look, my heart quivering of fear for being called a retard again because of this accusation, I have the fondest memory of the stories told in these games from when I played them as a kid. When I replay them today with the critical eye developed since then, I notice all the faults. Marvelously, these games play exceptionally well and with very few faults even today. That's extremely laudable. That the story and setting has problems is an almost insignificant problem in comparison. In other words, when I was a kid, I loved everything about these games. I used to write endless notes on the story. Today, when I replay them, I find few faults with the way they play, which is an immense achievement. I see plenty of glaring faults with the lore, however.

That's why I don't care much how they frame that in MMX.

if Limbic/Ubisoft want us to explore a straight cliche fantasy world

Please bro. No matter what, you cannot deny that M&M was unoriginal even in its time. P&Ps and fantasy novels were filled to the brim with fantasy/SCI-FI crossover worlds. I used to swallow this shit down like a modern teenager swallows Todd Howard's semen. The only ones that did something remotely interesting with the premise RPG-wise were the folks at Shadowrun, because they at least turned the premise on its head. And Shadowrun is still a pretty banal and uninteresting setting compared to ones of higher quality.

You may like the setting of M&M and you may disagree with me on the points I make here, but the claim that it was original is factually false.

My issue is that you read my initial statement and built a strawman to justify "doubting your allegiance to some codexers".

That wasn't a strawman like the nostalgia goggles thing was, though. This was, and is, a legitimate concern of mine. When I came here years ago and until recently, I thought I shared a sort of gaming ideal with the bros of this place. I thought what united us - storyfags, C&C-fags, mondblut-fags, oldfags, whatever - was that we were critical that RPGs and games in general had moved their focus from integrating complex and deep game mechanics and shifted their focus to the stories these games wanted to tell. In other words, no matter who you were, no matter which crowd you belonged to, at least you agreed that the move away from gameplay-focus and onto other things was bad. C&C-fags might disagree with the stat-guys, but their concern was telling stories and roleplaying through consequences to your actions - i.e. game mechanics. Dungeon crawlers might disagree with people who just wanted Morrowind exploration back, but both wanted a certain type of gameplay back that had disappeared. The withering of mechanics concerned these people more than the rape of some lame fantasy story.

With the Fallout-thread and now your comment, it seems I was wrong at a very fundamental level. Codexian bros do not share a universal aggreeance that games are first and foremost about the way they play. In some way, that's fine, I suppose, and it's my own fault for thinking this without having it confirmed.

That doesn't make my "doubting my allegiance" comment less true however. Of course I feel less part of a whole when it turns out I don't share this core ideal with everyone. The fact of the matter is that I believed back when I joined - and still do - that games are first and foremost about their mechanics and their systems, and everything else gains value from how they tie into that. How mechanics play off of setting and vice versa, for instance. Until recently, I thought this was pretty much an accepted fact here.

And THEN you used the nostalgia goggles. I like you despite often disagreeing with you, but NEVER DO THAT AGAIN. Or else plane tickets :bryce:

I find it ridicoulous that I must attone deeply for my transgressions regarding that comment - nevermind the fact that I actually apologized for it and have gotten no apologies in return for the bullshit launched in my direction.

Also, your shitting on M&M setting finally reveals your true reasons for not liking Dune

Hey, I never said I didn't like Dune. I said I loved the beginning, and then it got boring. Then I asked whether it got better. I didn't really receive a straight answer from anyone

 

[Grunker]

No camera hassles. No getting stuck because a shrub or tree root or one foot ledge is in your way. No endless hiking. Hassle wise it is actually quite easy to argue in favor of grid based.

I had no camera hassles in M&M 6-8. I never got stuck in M&M 6-8. The not-so-endless hiking was made into a functioning mechanic in M&M VII by making it a part of the character progression. Once you had Fly and Lloyd's Beacon, moving around became effectively much, much easier than with a grid.

 

[Charles-cgr]

No camera hassles. No getting stuck because a shrub or tree root or one foot ledge is in your way. No endless hiking. Hassle wise it is actually quite easy to argue in favor of grid based.

I had no camera hassles in M&M 6-8. I never got stuck in M&M 6-8. The not-so-endless hiking was made into a functioning mechanic in M&M VII by making it a part of the character progression. Once you had Fly and Lloyd's Beacon, moving around became effectively much, much easier than with a grid.

Once you had Fly and Lloyd's beacon in the earlier MMs it became instantaneous

Cameras were (almost) fixed in MM6-8 (save the ability to look up/down by increments) and the world was root-less, hedge-less and shrub-less but nowadays these gameplay issues are common trade-offs for more visually complete worlds. If MMX went with the free-roaming option I don't think they could afford to make the world as empty as it was in the later MMs without being seriously criticized for laziness.

That's one thing I learned from making a game. Add something someone wants and it will very often be criticized by another who will want the next thing on the list to making the game look like today's AAA games.

 

[Grunker]

Once you had Fly and Lloyd's beacon in the earlier MMs it became instantaneous

That was my point - there's no reason for arguing that angle, the only contest stands between basic walking with free movement and with grid

Cameras were (almost) fixed in MM6-8 (save the ability to look up/down by increments) and the world was root-less, hedge-less and shrub-less but nowadays these gameplay issues are common trade-offs for more visually complete worlds.

World evolution in video games is not an excuse for shitty movement design in free movement games. As terrible as Skyrim was, I don't recall getting stuck in it, and that's a prime example of your modern hiking simulator.

That's one thing I learned from making a game. Add something someone wants and it will very often be criticized by another who will want the next thing on the list to making the game look like today's AAA games

Yeah, man. I want a turn-based exploration game to look more like a AAA-game. That's my hidden agenda.

Jesus christ. People get on my ass for that one nostalgia comment yet don't bat an eyelid over terrible strawmen like these. Fuck all y'all and your bias.

 

[Varnaan]

MM6 - 8 control like shit, have tons of collision bugs, thousands of ways to get stuck anywhere anytime and the combat system is dreadful compared to the slick and elegant grid based movement of the earlier games thus proving that grid > free movement.

 

[Charles-cgr]

Yeah, man. I want a turn-based exploration game to look more like a AAA-game. That's my hidden agenda.

Jesus christ. People get on my ass for that one nostalgia comment yet don't bat an eyelid over terrible strawmen like these. Fuck all y'all and your bias.

OH wow. Where did I say it was your agenda? I was saying that if MMX went the free-roam route then they would be expected by others (not you) to make it dense, which would surely lead to the complications I mentioned.

 

[Grunker]

Varnaan: How many times did I write that I supported grids in combat? Fifteen? Twenty? Make this twenty-one. Perhaps your reading skill will have improved since no. 20.

OH wow. Where did I say it was your agenda? I was saying that if MMX went the free-roam route then they would be expected by others (not you) to make it dense, which would surely lead to the complications I mentioned.

My apologies, I misunderstood you.

Don't you think density is expected even with the grid?

 

[Charles-cgr]

Varnaan: How many times did I write that I supported grids in combat? Fifteen? Twenty? Make this twenty-one. Perhaps your reading skill will have improved since no. 20.

OH wow. Where did I say it was your agenda? I was saying that if MMX went the free-roam route then they would be expected by others (not you) to make it dense, which would surely lead to the complications I mentioned.

My apologies, I misunderstood you.

Don't you think density is expected even with the grid?

Yes, I do. But it doesn't have the above-mentioned complications with grid. The current game footage shows quite a bit of density btw.

 

[Grunker]

Varnaan: How many times did I write that I supported grids in combat? Fifteen? Twenty? Make this twenty-one. Perhaps your reading skill will have improved since no. 20.

OH wow. Where did I say it was your agenda? I was saying that if MMX went the free-roam route then they would be expected by others (not you) to make it dense, which would surely lead to the complications I mentioned.

My apologies, I misunderstood you.

Don't you think density is expected even with the grid?

Yes, I do. But it doesn't have the above-mentioned complications with grid. The current game footage shows quite a bit of density btw.

Man, I am dense. I think I only just understood your point. You're conceding that a game like Skyrim doesn't have the issues we talked about, but that grid-movement allows the development team to avoid even spending time on said issues?

What about the point, then, that games like Wizardry 8 or M&M VII hardly had those issues either? I concede that their were a couple of clipping issues in those games, but nothing remotely as annoying as having to move on a grid throughout the entirety of a game.

 

[Varnaan]

Varnaan: How many times did I write that I supported grids in combat? Fifteen? Twenty? Make this twenty-one. Perhaps your reading skill will have improved since no. 20.

It was a joke dude

Although I believe the free movement -> combat grid transition would be a pretty terrible idea, do you have any example of a game doing it ?
I'd like to play it to see if my wariness is founded.

I really understand where you're coming from but to be honest I was really turned off by the later M&M and Wizardry 8 free movement because, at the time at least, the developers really did horrible things with the landscape and especially how steep slopes (I don't know if that's the right word) were handled.
I'm probably biased as shit though since my favorite game is Darkside.

 

[Grunker]

Although I believe the free movement -> combat grid transition would be a pretty terrible idea, do you have any example of a game doing it ?

Not many, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. Chaos Chronicles, an oldschool RPG under development, does this, though that's isometric.

I will concede that slopes were handled pretty horribly in the classics, but that's long since been solved.